Digital Connections

As software giant SAP convened Sapphire, its annual user meeting, at the gleaming new Boston Convention & Exhibition Center earlier this month, the Bio-IT World Conference & Exposition, focusing on biotech research information technology (IT), kicked off at the venerable Hynes Convention Center across town.

Most of the action took place at the biotech event, where big names in computers and software such as IBM, GE, and Hewlett-Packard, vied--and partnered--with emerging software firms for position in the drive to redefine research IT.

In fact, the importance of health-care-related IT came across in the comments of former U.S. Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, Sapphire's keynote speaker. O'Neill told the convention that improved data management is central to his vision of cutting U.S. health care costs in half through elimination of inefficiencies in the current system--a perfect example of which is the classic illegible prescription. O'Neill sees an $800 billion saving opportunity in increased adherence to operating procedures and the establishment of standards for data management.

Lawrence J. Lesko, director of the Office of Clinical Pharmacology & Biopharmaceuticals at the Food & Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation & Research, picked up on this theme in his keynote at Bio-IT World, describing CDER's goal of improving health care through advances in data management. Improvement is needed, Lesko said, in an industry where three-quarters of all records are kept on paper. Regulatory agencies around the world, he added, need to better coordinate their procedures given the global nature of drug development.

Improving communication and collaboration was a major theme on the exhibit floor at the biotech event, presented by Bio-IT World magazine, with several firms exhibiting new software that connects databases to desktop computers in research labs. Underpinning this emerging "middle layer" in the IT architecture are new standards for communicating data between individual researchers.

Yike Guo, chief executive officer of laboratory workflow software vendor InforSense, said the purpose of software development in the sector is to simplify network configuration. "IT has become a bottleneck," Guo said. "Our motivation is to make it easier for scientists to concentrate on science by eliminating the bottleneck."

According to Guo, while scientific software is starting to employ the sort of Web-based architecture that business software does, scientific research poses specific challenges. "In business software, the logic is usually fixed," he said, "but the logic of laboratory analytics is totally ad hoc."

At the Boston meeting, InforSense announced a software development collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline and the laboratory visualization software firm Spotfire. Calling Spotfire a "de facto standard for the desktop," Guo said he wants to establish a new software standard to connect front-end lab systems to databases.

Accelrys, a vendor of bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and modeling software, is marketing workflow software called Pipeline Pilot developed by Scitegic, which Accelrys acquired last year. According to David J. Edwards, Accelrys' director of computational biology, the increased data burden and greater emphasis on collaboration in drug discovery is stoking growth in IT integration and maintenance services. "Drug and biotech firms that have built up custom infrastructures realize they may have to tear these down and rebuild," Edwards said. He added that the workflow IT and service business is behind Accelrys' growth in 2004, its first year of positive orders growth in four years.

Another supplier of workflow software, TurboWorx, exhibited in the Hewlett-Packard booth, along with informatics software supplier Tripos, knowledge management system vendor SAS, and several other software companies. HP is promoting a multivendor approach in which it configures and maintains IT for research using software "clustering" technology from another partner, Scali.

Meanwhile, GE Healthcare, formed with GE's acquisition of Amersham Biosciences in 2003, is marketing a system called Discovery Hub, developed at the University of Pennsylvania and first used by SmithKline Beecham, a GlaxoSmithKline predecessor. Discovery Hub employs structured query language in a Web-based architecture that connects desktop laboratory computers to public and private databases, according to Nick Giannasi, head of informatics at GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences.

While most other industries standardized on "middleware" between databases and user PCs 10 years ago, only now is the software industry able to accommodate the complex data management requirements of pharma and biotech research, Giannasi said. The post-genomic-data bubble has also helped break through a cultural barrier to the use of software that promotes collaboration in the lab, he said.

RESEARCH DIRECTORS at Bio-IT World were enthusiastic about new developments in lab system architecture. "The bane of my existence is bringing different types of information together," said Stephen M. Prescott, executive director of Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah. Traditionally, he said, this task has been accomplished by getting a computer-savvy postdoctoral student to make a one-off link. But a separate link is programmed for every problem that arises, and "the net effect is that you solve one problem by creating another," Prescott said.

At the conference, the university announced a collaboration in which IBM will develop a system to integrate and query the large Utah Population Database and Utah Genetic Reference Project Database at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center.

Back at Sapphire, software and service firms were also discussing emerging middle-level software and new challenges in data management. Software and services aimed at tying plant controls to the enterprise resource planning software marketed by SAP was a key focus among chemical industry users of SAP's R/3 software.

Here, the challenge is to route data from a diverse array of manufacturing plant digital controls to headquarters in order to expedite decision-making. While some firms, like AspenTechnology, market manufacturing execution system (MES) software to sort and route data, there is a growing consulting business in helping firms use already-installed systems.

Bangalore, India-based InfoSys is becoming an important player in this field, working with several major chemical companies including Eastman Chemical. Raghu Cavale, head of InfoSys' chemical business, noted that the global footprint of manufacturing will spread for most major chemical companies over the next 10 years, complicating an already complex data management scenario.

IBM is also active in system integration services, with a focus on asset optimization, according to John C. Arnold, a partner in IBM's chemicals consulting business. The firm is partnering with ABB, a supplier of control and MES systems, to engineer and maintain "plant-to-boardroom" IT architectures. He agrees with Cavale that growth in Asia will increase the need for advanced IT networks.